The Story of Charlotte's Web

by Michael Sims

  My first and greatest love affair was with this thing we call freedom … It began with the haunting intimation (which I presume every child receives) of his mystical inner life; of God in man; of nature publishing herself through the “I.” … To be free, in a planetary sense, is to feel that you belong to earth.

  AT THE BEGINNING of the twentieth century, during Theodore Roosevelt’s first term as president after the assassination of William McKinley, Mount Vernon was already a popular bedroom community for New Yorkers. In Westchester County, bordering the Bronx, it rose west of New Rochelle, perched high on shady, rolling hills. The three-story White family home, which they had built eight years before Elwyn’s birth, was atop Chester Hill, in a street inevitably named Summit Avenue, half an hour’s train commute from the center of Manhattan to the southwest. The hill was high enough that, on quiet days, a good wind would carry to the house the somber foghorn of the lighthouse that guarded the reef called Execution Rocks, on Sands Point to the southeast across Long Island Sound. Gabled Queen Anne houses with large wraparound porches lined Summit Avenue. In this calm and leafy neighborhood, the scent of honeysuckle and lilac drifted in at their windows, where the maid lowered shades halfway on bright days but raised the window so that filmy sheers fluttered in the breeze. The Whites’ lawn at 101 Summit, on the corner of East Sidney, was bright with iris, pansies, and showy-blossomed crabapple and pear trees, in delicate contrast to the black cast-iron urn; in the spring, jonquils and multicolored tulips outlined the property boundary along the sidewalk, beyond the privet hedge. A sprinkling cart still patrolled the streets to keep down the dust. Automobiles were just beginning to be seen chugging by; their backfiring still brought children and adults running to get a closer look at the newfangled contraptions.

  The house faced Summit, but the stable—that essential building and status symbol—faced Sidney. In Elwyn’s early childhood, the family traveled mostly in carriages. A subset of Whites could get about in a simple buggy whose roof, in good weather, folded back behind the single seat. Elwyn would come out of the house onto the roofed porch above the carriageway and race down the stairs to where a dark gelding stood hitched to a buggy, his eyes watchful, his tail switching flies. But for Elwyn’s parents to take the whole family out required a surrey, with three wide seats under a flat roof whose fringe never stopped wiggling during the ride. As the well-dressed family filed down the stairs on special occasions, the surrey looked elegant waiting in dappled shade at the corner of the big gray house.

  Elwyn thought of this house as his fortress. The ogee dome on the octagonal turret inspired medieval daydreams. From one of the tall windows on the third floor of the turret, above the screened porch, he imagined himself watching enemies sneak up from behind neighborhood trees or lurk around the privet hedge that surrounded the yard. In his mind a brace of cannon guarded the long second-floor porches. On hot, sticky summer nights he slept alone in a hammock on the screened porch and anxiously listened to nighttime noises in the yard. Why were those leaves rustling? Was that a twig snapping? In the dawn he woke to scuffing horse hooves and the creak of a wagon, followed by the glassy music of milk bottles being set down by back doors. It sounded like home and safety to him. Weekend and summer mornings, the rising sun found him going out to brave the uncertain world, knowing that when he encountered trouble he could always return home to the safe family castle.

  He was the last of seven children, but one before him had left the world so quickly that her death in infancy was seldom mentioned. Apparently Elwyn was unexpected. His father was forty-five and his mother forty-one when Elwyn Brooks (soon nicknamed En) was born on the eleventh of July 1899. Two of his sisters were already in their mid- and late teens, and his brothers Stanley and Albert were eight and eleven. By the time he was three, his oldest sister, Marion, was already getting married. Elwyn’s earliest faint memory was of the parlor roped off to form aisles for Marion’s wedding, which occurred shortly before he turned three. The closest sibling to his own age was his five-years-older redheaded sister, Lillian.

  For the first several years of his life, Elwyn’s Victorian parents dressed him in clothes as girlish as Lillian’s. In 1902, when Elwyn was three, Buster Brown first appeared as a comic strip character—an angelic-looking prankster accompanied by his pit-bull terrier named Tige, who talked to Buster but to no one else. Soon Buster’s sailor suit took children’s fashion by storm. Just as Albert had worn a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit several years earlier, Elwyn spent much of his childhood in a white suit precisely like Buster’s, its wide collar square in the back and coming to a point in front below the anchor on his shirt. The jacket was like an abbreviated dress over baggy short pants; black buckled shoes and an exaggerated wide-brim hat finished the costume. He wore this striking ensemble even while exploring the woods around Mount Vernon, and the comical hat would sometimes top off a different outfit.

  Elwyn was surrounded by the usual household chaos of a large family—kids running up and down stairs, screen doors slamming, a talkative crowd at every meal. Albert and Stanley were always busy; they even built a boat in the barn. Stan, who was as skinny as Elwyn but taller, was nicknamed Bunny (further shortened to Bun) because he twitched his nose for comic effect. A born teacher who already wore professorial spectacles, he tutored his younger brother in arcane rituals such as handling a pocketknife without cutting himself or paddling a canoe in a straight direction. In clowning demonstrations, Stan also taught Elwyn about such physics concepts as inertia and momentum and introduced him to the mysteries of the harmonic circle on their pianoforte. To demonstrate centrifugal force, Stan cried, “Now watch this!” and twirled a bucket of water until it swung horizontally around him. Even tilted sideways, the water didn’t run out. “You see?” Stan called to Elwyn. “Centrifugal force!”

  In 1910, when he was eleven, Elwyn stood outdoors on a warm April night and peered up at the pale streak of Comet Halley in the sky—a celestial migrant on its way back from the other side of the solar system. The bushy-tailed comet was easily visible and a favorite topic of conversation. Many people, including the Whites’ cook and maid, worried that it was a bad omen. A few scientists speculated that it might at least cause contagion as Earth passed through its tail. The newspapers reported that, as he had predicted, Mark Twain died during the weeks while the comet was at its brightest in the sky, just as he had been born during its nineteenth-century visit. The time-traveling comet had last been seen from Earth seventy-five and a half years earlier, when Elwyn’s now deceased grandfather was about the age that Elwyn was now. The papers emphasized that the comet wouldn’t be back again to visit Earth until 1986.

  On summer nights Elwyn liked to sit on the front steps after dark. His was a quiet and safe neighborhood where each family knew the others on the block, and as the heat of the day faded, many people could be found strolling along the street or sitting on a porch and chatting. Elwyn would let his mind wander and his senses fill up with the sounds and smells of the safe, domesticated darkness around him. He could hear the clip-clop of carriage horses on their way to unknown destinations, the frenzied and exciting roar of an automobile a few blocks away, and feel the breeze that rustled the trees and hedge, where birds and squirrels and other animals lived lives so different from his own.

  Gradually, in early childhood, Elwyn became aware that animals were actors themselves, living their own busy lives, not merely background characters in his own little drama. The song of the crickets rose and fell like a symphony. He realized that countless tiny musicians were out there in the grass, hidden but just as real as human beings, as alive as himself, playing music on their own legs like animated violins. He was a part of nature like every other creature. Yet he was very much an individual creature, which meant that they were too. Like his friend Freddie, whose voice he could often hear from the Schuler house across the street, like Miss Kirby with chalk on her hands at school, like his mother in her lace and bun chatting indoors behind him with his mustache
d and oratorical father, he was unique. Yes, he was a part of nature, but somehow he was the only Elwyn Brooks White.

  Chapter 2

  FEAR

  I don’t know whether a passionate love of the natural world can be transmitted or not, but like the love of beauty it is a thing one likes to associate with the scheme of inheritance.

  WHILE HIS SIBLINGS were too far away in age to provide ideal playmates, Elwyn was born at the right time to get more attention from his father than had any of his brothers and sisters. Slender, dapper Samuel White, whose big gray mustache couldn’t hide his affectionate smile, was a thrifty, formal, teetotaling businessman who came downstairs on weekday mornings in starched cuffs and wing collars. In his youth he had found time to write and publish a handful of songs, including one called “Sweet Dreams of Childhood.” Starting at the age of fifteen, doing office chores, he had worked his way up through the successful New York–based piano manufacturer Horace Waters & Company, from clerk to branch manager and then officer of the company. By the time of his youngest son’s birth, he was scrawling Sam’l White above the titles “General Manager and Vice President.” Now a prosperous man, Samuel appreciated his family and enjoyed his leisure hours with them. He could also spare more time now because he was employing other staff at home besides the coachman. As a baby, Elwyn was tended by an English nanny, a girl named Kezzie Simpson, who was so fond of her infant charge that she later named her own firstborn son after him.

  Elwyn’s maternal grandfather, Scottish-born William Hart, had been a successful landscape painter, a member—as was his brother James McDougal Hart—of the loose affiliation called the Hudson River School. William Hart’s legacy to the family was about nature as much as art. Starting out as an eight-year-old apprentice to a coachmaker, decorating door panels, he later painted portraits until he built up enough of a career to concentrate on portraying nothing but his true love in life—landscapes. He found, wrote a contemporary journalist, “that there was an inexhaustible fund of subjects among our hills and beside our streams.” Famed for his uncanny ability to remember minute details of a scene long after he observed it, Hart painted luminous panoramas of New England mountains and rolling hillsides in golden late-afternoon sunlight, such as his lovingly detailed portrait of Mount Madison rising behind the placid Androscoggin River in New Hampshire. He was also known for his skill in painting animals, especially the cows that, despite their careful breeding toward a one-sided goal beyond their control, became a popular symbol of harmonious nature among Hudson River artists. Hart became a fellow of various academies. Elwyn’s mother referred to him as an Academician. His work sold for impressive sums; a painting might fetch five thousand dollars even in the 1870s. He was so well-known that his death in 1894, five years before Elwyn was born, prompted long obituaries in the New York papers. “He refused,” declared the Register, “to be an imitator.” Elwyn’s brother Stanley was the only child to receive their grandfather’s surname as a middle name. Tall and skinny and red-haired, he also resembled Hart and enjoyed painting and drawing.

  Elwyn’s mother, Jessie, cherished the family heritage. She may have married a businessman, she seemed to imply at times, but while Samuel was the son of a carpenter, she in contrast was the daughter of a famous artist. (Samuel’s own parents had lived out a similar dynamic, his English mother losing access to her family estate because she married a mere tradesman.) Elwyn absorbed respect for artistic achievement from the very air he breathed at home on quiet Summit Avenue—and perhaps also inherited impatience with social conventions that didn’t rate this kind of accomplishment highly. He browsed through his grandfather’s sketchbooks, slowly turning the oversize pages and admiring details of animal figures laboriously worked out in charcoal before they made it into a painting—especially the cows, their tilted horns and split hooves, their milk-heavy udders and sad, dark eyes. The former home of William Hart was just across the street on Sidney Avenue. Jessie’s stories about him made it easy for Elwyn to imagine his grandfather standing on the porch or sitting in his studio, finishing up a painting of hillsides bathed in the kind of slanting, moody light that his grandson also loved. In Jessie’s photos, her father had the beard of a Civil War general but the faraway gaze of a poet.

  Jessie Hart White was much older than the mothers of Elwyn’s friends. Each morning she perched round metal glasses high on her nose and pulled her silvery white hair back and up to form an elegant bun. A gracious and kindhearted woman, she loved order and comfort, privacy and family. For a formal portrait with her youngest son, she wore a crisp white scalloped lace collar over a dark brocade dress and a large bow around the high waist. Jessie seldom appeared energetic; even her smile looked almost sad. By the time of Elwyn’s birth, his mother was already experiencing the diminished vigor that would mark the rest of her life. Elwyn once found her in the seldom-used reception room, across the hall from the parlor, lying stretched out on the sofa. Always expecting the worse, Elwyn immediately thought she was dead, but she turned out to be recovering from a harrowing ride on a runaway horse. In household administration she managed the cook and maid but tired quickly. Yet her temperament was mostly optimistic and uncomplaining, like that of the man she married. She was plainspoken in contrast to his grandiloquence, but they enjoyed each other’s company. Together they traveled often in the United States and once even crossed the Atlantic via steamship to visit Europe.

  Elwyn was closer to his father. “All hail!” wrote Samuel White to his son on his twelfth birthday, “with joy and gladness we salute you on your natal day.” Elwyn and Lillian rolled their eyes at their father’s rhetorical flourishes but basked in his pride. Father and son spent many daytime hours exploring the world together. Samuel once wrote to Albert, who was attending Cornell, about recent adventures with Elwyn: “Oh, the joy, the joy of my little boy; we have lots of good times together.” After dinner Samuel and Elwyn engaged in wide-ranging conversations. Samuel was interested in the outdoors and the strange workings of nature. On warm mornings he liked to ride his bike around the reservoir east of town, before catching the train to work, and admire the sunlight and birdsong.

  Sometimes, after Sunday lunch, he would herd the family onto a succession of rattling trolley cars for a trip to the New York Zoological Park, which had opened the year Elwyn was born. (It was later renamed the Bronx Zoo.) They would happily file past fat wrinkled elephants and monkeys like caricatures of people, or stand peering up at the foreshortened, oddly patterned necks of giraffes. The family took young Elwyn along to see the hugely popular Broadway extravaganza The Wizard of Oz. It bore little resemblance to L. Frank Baum’s children’s book from 1900. In place of feisty Toto was Imogene, a cow whose vaguely bovine frame was inhabited by an actor. But these discrepancies didn’t stop Elwyn from admiring the cyclone, the marching chorus girls, and the wonderful snowstorm that buried in white all the actors and even the chorus dressed as poppy blossoms.

  Samuel also took them to the circus in Madison Square Garden. Several times they attended spectacles at the colossal Hippodrome Theater on Sixth Avenue between Forty-third and Forty-fourth. Built by the architects who had conjured Luna Park at Coney Island, the Hippodrome had a stage literally a dozen times larger than an average Broadway theater. Circus acts might entertain between an opera and a drama. An entire circus could stomp the boards at once—hundreds of costumed people and animals cavorting. Once at the Hippodrome Elwyn thrilled to the ranks of beautiful, scantily clad women marching down a flight of stairs into a pool and somehow remaining underwater for several minutes before walking back up to rapturous applause. When he asked his father how this miracle was accomplished, however, Samuel’s hemming and hawing left Elwyn doubtful about what he had formerly considered paternal omniscience.

  Naturally the children of a piano manufacturer were kept supplied with musical instruments. Besides a grand piano, the house held at various times a reed organ and even a high-backed Waters player piano called an Autola. Stan played violin
and Elwyn himself tried mandolin and piano and even took cello lessons. In 1908, at the age of nine, he informed Albert, who was already at Cornell, that their father had given him a new book of sheet music. “I know eight pieces out of it already,” he bragged, and added, “I am also composing pieces too.” Other siblings could turn to a banjo or a guitar or even a set of drums. Elwyn would visit his father’s Manhattan office and hear somewhere in the building the distant melancholy sound of a piano being tuned.

  Every Christmas Eve, a local German band would stand in the yellow glow of the gas lamp at the corner of Summit Avenue and play their uncertain way through “Heilige Nacht.” Then the musicians would appoint an envoy to venture onto the porch and ring the front doorbell. Inside his cozy home, intoxicated with the nearness of Christmas, Elwyn always waited for the ring as if watching a familiar play. It was traditional that Samuel would open the door himself to reveal the grinning, pink-cheeked, and snow-frosted musician, who had tucked his shiny horn under his arm to ring the bell, because Samuel already had in his pocket a holiday token with which to thank the band. Soon the carolers could be heard launching into a new chorus down the block, at the home of Elwyn’s friend Billy Denman. Going up to bed, Elwyn would pause at the top of the stairs, looking down at the wrapped parcels hanging on the hat rack in the hall. They held candy that was expected to last until New Year’s Day. It never did.

  I suffered nothing except the routine terrors of childhood.

  WITH THEIR INCOME and family legacy, Samuel and Jessie White would have been able to join Mount Vernon’s influential moneyed class with its own narrow definition of Society. They simply didn’t want to. Both paid far more attention to their family than to the world beyond Summit Avenue. Few outsiders entered their home; they seldom invited a guest for dinner. This limited social circle was one reason why, as his older siblings drifted away from home into college and jobs and marriage, quiet Elwyn depended more and more upon his own imagination for entertainment.